It all started with the development of "Hypertext" in 1965.
Hypertext is text in a document that can be linked to other sections of
the same document, or other documents altogether. These links are what
the web is built upon. Every link in a web page is an example of hypertext.

In 1989, physics researcher Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a revolutionary
information-sharing system for computer networks that he felt might foster
communication in the high-energy physics community. Berners-Lee wrote
up a proposal, entitled "HyperText and CERN" (CERN is an acronym for the
Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, or the European Nuclear
Research Council). Berners-Lee circulated this proposal amongst his peers,
generating much excitement.

The proposal contained three provisions:

-The information-sharing system must be universally accessible to
anyone connected to the computer network, regardless of computer platforms.

-The information-sharing system must have a consistent user interface
that would look and behave in the same fashion no matter how it was
accessed.

-The information-sharing system must allow links between documents,
forming a web of relationships between text, graphics, sound, and video.

In March of 1991, Berners-Lee's vision became reality.
The information-sharing system, newly rechristened as the "World Wide Web"
was made available to the physics community through a CERN computer. Because
it "served" up batches of cross reference documents specially
formatted for this web like informatin-sharing system, the physicists
called this type of machine a "Web server."

In January of 1992, the World Wide Web was made available
to the public, and by the end of 1992, there were 50 Web servers in operation
worldwide. Most of these machines were housed on university campuses.

Then, in early 1993, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
undergrad named Marc Andreessen developed a new interface to the world
wide web that he called the Mosiac Browser. Mosiac allowed graphics to
be used online for the first time, letting people actually design webpages
instead of the solid text based pages available before.

The New York Times called Mosiac the "killer app of the
Internet," and its ease of use fueled some fairly explosive growth. By
the end of 1993, the number of Web servers jumped to 623.

In 1994, Andreessen teamed up with Silicon Graphics chair
Jim Clark to form Netscape Communications Corporation. Because the University
of Illinois owned the rights to Mosiac, Andreessen and Clark immediately
began marketing their Netscape Navigator, a commercial version of the
Mosiac Browser.

Mosiac was later sold to Spry corporation.
Spry was then acquired by CompuServe which was then aquired by Worldcom.
Worldcom dumped Mosiac, retained the rest of CompuServe's infrastructure,
and sold the CompuServe customer roster to a service provider named America
Online.

By the mid-1990s, the web had exploded to such a degree
that many households were connected online, and many more businesses saw
it as new territory to conquer, led by such upstarts as Amazon and E-Toys.
And "old school" technology companies such as Microsoft and
IBM started changing their entire business strategies to focus on web
based products.

Today, an estimated 230,000 Web servers, each containing
hundreds of thousands of documents known as "web pages", are in operation.